


No Church in the Wild

by Gray_Days



Series: Children of Pallas [7]
Category: DCU, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Genre: Earth-3, Even evil has standards, F/M, Mirror Universe, Prompt Fic, bad people doing bad things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2019-12-07 00:35:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18227525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: “Wow,” Superwoman said.There was a single final choking sound from the vigilante, the beginning of a breath slithering free of his lungs and escaping into the night air, before he sagged in Owlman’s grasp and Owlman let him fall to the ground. “Was there something you wished to say.”“Just that you usually take the time to lecture people before finishing them off.” The shadows shifted on Owlman’s face as he tilted his head, and Superwoman clarified, “Not that I’m complaining. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to [a combined pair of tumblr prompts](https://metatextuality.tumblr.com/post/183686267648/ill-prompt-the-cold-shoulder-option-lets-see): “Write about your characters having a legitimate argument over something that couples argue over, and working it out in a normal and healthy way. (Sex doesn’t solve all problems, and neither do empty apologies.)” + “Write something that completely obliterates a gross stereotype associated with a character of your choice.”
> 
> It's not a particularly normal argument, but this is probably the best we're going to get without crossing any major lines.
> 
> Skullface is the mirror-universe counterpart of Black Mask. (Batman once used the same alias in the canon universe to infiltrate the False-Face Society. This is not that version.)
> 
>  **Warnings:**  
>  Discussion of child sexual abuse, statutory rape, and sexual misconduct.

“Wow,” Superwoman said as Owlman pulled a blade out from between Skullface’s ribs with an arterial spray that splattered dark and shining across the front of his armour. There was a single final choking sound from the vigilante, the beginning of a breath slithering free of his lungs and escaping into the night air, before he sagged in Owlman’s grasp and Owlman let him fall to the ground. After a moment of consideration, he stomped down on the man’s face with a hideous crack of bone. 

Owlman crouched to wipe the blade off on the sleeve of Skullface’s suit, then secreted it somewhere amidst the arsenal under his cloak as he stood again. “Was there something you wished to say.” 

“Just that you usually take the time to lecture people before finishing them off.” The shadows shifted on Owlman’s face as he tilted his head, and Superwoman clarified, “Not that I’m complaining. I’m just surprised, that’s all.” 

Owlman glanced contemptuously down at Skullface once more. “I said everything I needed to say the first time I thought I’d killed him. At least this time, it should take.” 

“Right.” Superwoman crowded him against the blood- and smog-stained brick wall of the alley, lifting Owlman’s chin with one finger and listening to his breathing slow. “And that’s the only reason you’re mad?” 

“I’m not devoid of all human emotion. Did you assume I was?” He was hard to read, but Superwoman could sense the tension running through Owlman’s body, muscles coiled for fight-or-flight, voice lined with steel like razor wire pulled taut. 

She frowned. “I just want you to be straight with me. We’re dating — that’s supposed to entail some level of honesty.” Not that Superwoman ever felt obligated to be completely honest with anyone; it wasn’t like Owlman _needed_ to know that her problem was more with him holding things back than the purity of their romantic bond or whatever. When he didn’t answer immediately, she traced her hand up along his cheek, pushing her thigh between his legs, searching for some kind of reaction. “Most people would be bothered by the accusation that they fuck kids.” 

Owlman went perfectly still. _Bullseye,_ Superwoman thought, just before he said, “Don’t you?” 

Superwoman pulled back in disgust, resisting the urge to slap him. (Just enough to make him bleed. Just enough to make him sorry, to put him on the ground and make him look at her with fear in his gaze, to think twice about everything he said to her. Something that she couldn’t take back.) “Don’t be horrible. I’m a psychopath, not a pedophile.” 

“You see my point,” Owlman replied with crystalline precision. 

Superwoman took a deep breath, putting her hands on her hips to keep them from clenching into fists the way they wanted to. Owlman hadn’t moved except to shift his weight forward over the balls of his feet again now that she was no longer pressed against him; like hell was she going to be the first one to reveal her discomfiture. “This really bothers you,” she observed after a moment. 

“I’m _bothered,”_ Owlman said, “that the self-designated moral guardians of this world are blind enough to its realities to assume I do what I do because I couldn’t possibly grasp moral compunctions, rather than because I’ve seen theirs and disagree with them.” 

Superwoman blinked. “Surely you’re not implying you have morals.” 

“Of course not. Standards, yes.” Owlman bent down and slung the corpse over his shoulder in an apparently effortless fireman’s carry — Superwoman felt a familiar little thrill at that, the fact that Skullface was at least as large as he was and under the power armour Owlman’s body was nothing but layer upon layer of dense muscle — then leapt up the wall, kicking off to catch a window ledge on the opposite side of the alley with his free hand and propel himself from there up to the roof. 

Superwoman followed him, cresting the top of the building just as Owlman set off across the rooftop in an easy decathlete’s lope, flinging himself across the gaps between buildings with the confidence of knowing exactly where his feet would land on the other side. “What’s the plan?” 

Owlman made a three-point landing on a steeply sloped flying buttress held up by a trio of perturbed gargoyles, grabbing the overhanging lip at the edge to keep from sliding off, then made his way up to where it met the side of a peaked copper roof. “Feng Li used to work closely with Skullface,” he explained as he moved. “Generally speaking, she’s more intelligent than he was.” Superwoman took this to mean that Li recognised which way the wind was blowing, rather than putting on a mask and trying to tack against it like her ex-partner. Owlman walked along the gutter like a balance beam — unhesitant, one foot in front of the other in sure procession — until he reached the far end, where he shot a grappling hook into the skyscraper across the street; a quick tug to check that it was properly anchored, and he launched himself straight off the roof into empty space, cape fluttering behind him as he swung up onto a gnarled limestone cornice overlooking Gotham’s visual cacophony of glowing signs and the tightly-packed diamond and ruby dots of car headlights. “We’re going to pay her a visit.” 

“And then what?” 

“I’m going to ask her a few questions. You’ll serve as insurance.” Which meant standing nearby looking intimidating, one of Superwoman’s specialties. Owlman disengaged the grappling hook and retracted it back into its launcher, then vanished it back under his cloak as he stepped forward along the ledge — only to stop as Superwoman alighted in front of him, blocking his path. 

“Just one question first.” Superwoman took a step toward him, studying Owlman’s body language. “Why are you running away from me?” 

“What makes you think I’m running away from you?” he asked in that too-mild way he did when he was trying to make her feel stupid without saying so aloud. 

“The fact that you literally started running halfway across the city rather than explain what you meant,” Superwoman pointed out drily. 

“What more is there to say?” Impossible to tell from Owlman’s tone of voice, but Superwoman thought she caught a hint of irritation at being called out. 

She rolled her eyes. “You take _pride_ in people thinking you're a soulless monster. Don’t try to claim you never thought about how it would look to collect little kids so you could brainwash them into treating you like a god.” 

“That seems like more of a problem with those who would look at any association between an adult and a child and assume it must be sexual than with my choice to train people still young enough to mold.” 

Superwoman laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh. “And yet you’re surprised? People are _trash_. They all assume everyone secretly wants to do the worst things they can think of, just because they’re terrified that they might be the only one thinking it.” 

Owlman let out a soft huff of breath, then looked back up into Superwoman’s eyes with a mirthless, jagged smirk. “Indulge me in a thought experiment for a moment.” 

Superwoman sighed and put her hand on her hip. “Fine.” 

“How young must someone be for you to be unwilling to have sex with them?” 

Superwoman stared at him, suspecting a trap. “I don’t know, maybe fifteen or sixteen?” That was erring a little on the high side, admittedly; she refused to take responsibility for anyone who could be mistaken for adult at first glance. It wasn’t as if she usually bothered to _ask._

“Why?” Owlman inquired, too reasonably for the current context of their discussion. 

“Because I’m not into anyone who can’t understand what’s happening?” she answered slowly. 

“So why were you upset when I suggested otherwise?” 

“Just because I don’t have morals doesn’t mean I’m _desperate,”_ Superwoman snapped before his exact wording sank in. “And I wasn’t upset. I just thought you knew me better than that.” 

Owlman swept his free hand out in a conclusive gesture, as if he’d just proved a point: _quod erat demonstrandum._ “Then we’re on the same page. I’ve never pretended to be anything but precisely what I am. I don’t like the results of my work going unrecognised.” 

The word _liar_ hovered unspoken on the tip of Superwoman’s tongue. Owlman preferred to abide by the letter of his word, that was true; she would almost be inclined to believe him if she’d never seen how easily he switched masks around anyone he couldn’t openly manipulate. But disputing it would just drag them down a tangent Superwoman had zero interest in, and it wasn’t like she’d be able to hold the high ground in that argument. 

Instead she returned Owlman’s smirk and lifted off into the air once more. “Pride, I can understand. But don’t worry, dearest — I’ll defend your honour whenever you need me to.” 

His smirk widened into something dark and wolfish, with teeth, reflecting a faint bloody red from the taillights far below. “Then shall we get on with it?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> During the course of my wiki-trawling, I learned that in one of Black Mask’s earlier continuities he faced down Batman in a climactic battle in the burning Sionis family mansion, which ended when Black Mask was trapped under collapsing rubble; although he survived, his mask was permanently melted to his face, catapulting him decisively into DC’s gallery of disfigured villains until the next major retcon. This backstory seems to have been used by implication in subsequent continuities, though strangely seldom if ever brought up explicitly again. Regardless, it is so ridiculously, archetypally Comics™ that I cannot possibly overstate how much I enjoy it as a heroic backstory in the tradition of every disfigured protagonist featured in the literary canon.
> 
> Ms. Li has apparently only appeared in the film adaptation of Batman: Under the Red Hood as Black Mask’s personal assistant and has no listed given name, so I gave her one.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene wouldn’t leave me alone, so now you get it as well.
> 
>  **Warnings:**  
>  Sexual assault.

Feng Li, M.L.S. lived on the fifteenth floor of 12 North Parkside Ave., an area that used to belong conclusively to the corporate and financial district before it was forced to convert half of its square-footage to apartments following the passage of a sheaf of housing laws in the ‘80s meant to relieve the geographical inequity that had resulted in a city center occupied almost solely by millionaires and businesses, a complex shell built for the teeming masses to pass through like tourists before commuting by rail or automobile back to their homes in the more run-down residential outskirts of Gotham. North Parkside was still upscale, but now that entailed high society rather than high-stakes dealing, at least nigh-exclusively so. Ms. Li’s apartment boasted wide windows opening off to an art-deco balcony braided with wisteria — persistently green but no longer flowering now, in October — that revealed a perfect view into her bedroom.

“Would you like to handle Skullface,” Owlman asked, “or shall I?”

“He’s your corpse,” replied Superwoman in a tone that she probably thought sounded generous. As so often happened, it was more nonplussed, skeptical, with a slight irritable touch of resentment that she’d been made to feel that way; waiting to see, with a familiar underlying incredulity, what Owlman was planning.

The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “As you wish.”

The grapnel shot in a perfect arc to the balustrade of a balcony six floors above, wrapping around the railing and wedging the barbed hooks deep into the cast-iron embellishments. Owlman took a step, two, five, and _leapt_ off a snarling waterspout high up on the side of 17 North Parkside into a breathtaking freefall toward the street below, plummeting low enough to count individual headlights before the line snapped taut and slung him upward at breakneck speed. A second and a half before collision, he flung the corpse through the window ahead of him. Time seemed to slow for a fraction of a second: long enough for Owlman to see the crack pattern, the snowfall of shattered glass bursting into the apartment, the dark and disoriented form of Ms. Li as she shot upright from a sound slumber and opened her mouth to scream, then started to move…

Owlman tucked into a ball to avoid any stray glass and hit the floor rolling, coming up into a sprinter’s stance with one hand already gripping a blade, and stared down the barrel of a gun into the wide, terrified eyes of the woman holding it.

“Try it,” Owlman said softly as Superwoman flew through the window after him. From the corner of his eye he saw Superwoman turn in their target’s direction as Li worked out the calculus of the situation — outnumbered two-to-one, with only enough time to get off one shot at most, without the aid of her glasses — and he shook his head minutely. At the edge of his periphery, Superwoman relaxed.

And Ms. Li lowered the gun, raising her hands in an obeisant gesture of nonaggression.

Superwoman was instantly beside her, plucking the gun from her hand to slowly, holding Li’s gaze the entire time, crush it to crumpled, useless metal in her fist.

Sensibly, Ms. Li recoiled, eyes showing white all the way around the iris.

“I haven’t introduced my colleague, have I?” Owlman asked rhetorically as he stood. “Superwoman, meet Feng Li. Ms. Li, this is Superwoman, in Gotham on business.”

“Charmed,” replied Ms. Li after a moment of strained hesitation.

“Oh, she’s _cute,”_ said Superwoman with exaggerated shock. “You didn’t tell me she was this cute, Owlman.” She dropped the affectation. “Can we keep her?”

“That depends,” Owlman replied, tilting his head for a better view as the woman began to tremble. He finally released her from his gaze to turn toward the skull-faced corpse staining her carpet with blood and other noisome byproducts of death, slipping his toe under its shoulder to flip it onto its back. “How closely have you been working with your partner, Ms. Li?” He glanced back at her. “You might not recognise him. He’s been on fire since the last time you associated publicly.”

“I—” Ms. Li fumbled. “I thought he was dead. I had no idea—”

And yet she was only horrified by the sight of the man’s ruined face, not confused. Owlman couldn’t tell if her belief that she’d be able to lie to him indicated some semblance of a spine or mere craven self-preservation. “Break her right hand,” Owlman ordered Superwoman.

“He came to me!” Ms. Li shouted, back hitting the headboard in her scramble to get away. Superwoman paused with Ms. Li’s dominant hand gripped white-knuckled in her own. “I told him I wanted nothing to do with whatever he was planning and then I didn’t hear anything from him again, I’ve gone along with everything the Court has asked of me for the past two years, _please—”_

Owlman made a cutting gesture and Superwoman’s grip loosened, now merely inescapable. “I’m aware of that.” The sentence had much the same chilling effect on Ms. Li’s babbling as a severed head dropped into the middle of a conversation, a comparison with which Owlman was intimately familiar. “And yet you didn’t think it pertinent to inform any of my agents that you’d been contacted by a man last seen attempting to single-handedly topple my empire through sheer power of populist rhetoric.” He took a step toward her. “What _use_ are you to me, Ms. Li?”

“I…” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I was planning to, I just didn’t know who—”

Owlman nodded, and Ms. Li screamed as Superwoman crushed her hand.

“You served as paralegal to the the city’s most popular DA candidate since Harvey Dent,” Owlman said over her sobs. “You were involved in every step of his campaign from the start. Don’t insult us both by trying to pretend you don’t know who works for me.” Ms. Li was shaking her head in desperate denial — of his words, of the situation; at times like these, the lines tended to blur. _“Try. Again.”_

“I-I swear to you, I thought he was dead,” she choked out. Tears were beginning to track down her cheeks, reflecting red and gold in the lights of the city outside. “He only came to me a night ago, and I turned him away as soon as I could — I told him he was insane, that he needed help, and he just ranted at me and stormed off. I just didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

Which meant that she didn’t want the liability. That had certainly worked out well. “Your loyalty is admirable, Ms. Li.” He studied the ferocious glint in Superwoman’s eyes with appreciation. “Unfortunately, it’s to the wrong person.”

“I can do anything you want! I can get you information, steer juries, any—” Ms. Li was cut off by a muffled scream as Superwoman hauled her up by the broken hand into a brutal kiss. After a minute or so, she stopped struggling, only making the occasional suffocated noise of distress.

Finally Superwoman dropped her and she hit the bloodied floor on her knees and remaining hand, shuddering with near-silent sobs. Owlman stepped forward to grip Ms. Li’s chin in a taloned hand, forcing her to meet his gaze. “There are a _great_ number of bones in the human body, Ms. Li,” he said in a near-whisper. “And Superwoman can find _far_ more ways to hurt you if you fail me again.” He closed his hand as he straightened so that the claws sliced gashes into her cheeks and jaw, drawing another thin cry of pain from the woman. “You know how to contact me.”

He swept away in a swirl of cape to launch himself from the balcony railing into the open air, shooting his grapple gun at a projecting grotesque at the corner of the next skyscraper over so that he landed on the roof of the one beyond it; another quick step, and he braced one foot against the Tsenacommacah creeper-wreathed parapet to lean over and scan the city below. Ms. Li would find a great horned owl feather amidst the scattered glass shards in the morning, or once she’d recovered her relatively impressive composure if she was particularly observant — a reminder not to forget the promises she’d made this night.

Expect a lawyer to react to fear with a fawn response. Owlman let out a silent breath of something akin to laughter through his teeth.

A scrape of feet against the rooftop as Superwoman landed beside him. “That was awfully lenient of you. Especially after how her boss behaved.”

“Partner,” Owlman corrected. Anyone who failed to recognise the import of background administrative workers was doomed to failure, without even the justice of understanding why. “And she’ll be useful. She’s too attached to her life not to be. Competent people are a rare commodity.”

Superwoman leaned her hip against the parapet. In the daylight the leaves would be brilliant red in their fall colours, granting the building the appearance of having been drenched in fresh blood. Parkside Overlook Hotel, an automatic part of his mind informed him. Beloved of celebrities, business mavens, and once upon a time the classier brand of mob lord. “I would have kept her,” Superwoman remarked archly.

“You may yet have the opportunity.” Owlman turned to her. “The night’s only half over. I need to canvas the city, find out where Skullface was staying and who else he spoke to. Would you like to join me, or retire?”

Superwoman rolled her eyes. “Who knows what mischief you’ll get up to while I’m not around? Join you, _obviously.”_ She ran her hands over his shoulders, disregarding — or reveling in — the dried and drying blood staining half his uniform as she kissed him. Her expression was hungry when she pulled back. _“Then_ retire.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Soundtrack:**  
>  • [No Church in the Wild](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJt7gNi3Nr4) by Kanye West and Jay Z  
> • [National Anthem](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qFsND7dKYok) by Lana del Rey  
> • [The Ghost of Genova Heights](https://youtube.com/watch?v=V_xKeNGl_9M) by Stars
> 
> M.L.S. stands for a Master of Legal Studies, a postgraduate degree for paralegal work related to collecting evidence and testimony, preparing statements, and pretty much everything that isn’t representing someone in court. Ms. Li is a formidable administrator in either universe. (Any resemblance between the degree and her name is purely coincidental.)
> 
> I don’t typically like to use the word “insane” in my work, especially with characters who are prone to precision. However, Ms. Li is in the legal field, not the psychiatric, and therefore would be accustomed to using the legal definition of insanity, which argues that a defendant cannot be held responsible for their crime(s) due to mental illness.
> 
> Tsenacommacah is the name of the Powhatan homeland in Virginia; as the history of the mirror world is different from our own, so too would be geography-based plant names such as Virginia creeper.
> 
> Feedback and constructive criticism help motivate me to keep writing. If you'd like to read more, consider checking out [my other works in this fandom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/works?fandom_id=390).


End file.
